Matt A. Barreto, PhD

Meet American Decisions

Principals

Matt A. Barreto, PhD

Dr. Matt A. Barreto is the co-founder (with Gary Segura) of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions, and Professor of Political Science, and adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Washington. In 2012 Time Magazine called Latino Decisions the “gold-standard in Latino American polling” and Barreto’s research was recognized in the 30 Latinos who made the 2012 election by Politic365, listed in the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2012 by the European Politics Magazine LDSP, and was named one of the top 15 leading Latino pundits by Huffington Post which said Barreto was “the pollster that has his finger on the pulse of the Latino electorate.”

In 2010 Barreto implemented the first ever weekly tracking poll of Latino voters during the 2010 election, which LD continued in 2012. Working closley with Segura, he has also overseen large multi-state election eve polls, battleground tracking polls, extensive message testing research and countless focus groups. He has been invited to brief the U.S. Senate, the White House, Congressional Committees, and has been a keynote speaker at many of the major Hispanic association conferences including NALEO, LULAC, CHCI, NCLR and others.

He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine. Barreto has published more than forty scholarly research articles and book chapters that examine Latino public opinion, voting behavior, and race politics more generally in America. He is also the author of the two books, Ethnic Cues: The role of shared ethnicity in Latino political behavior published by the University of Michigan Press, as well as Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, published by Princeton University Press. He is currently completing his third book, co-authored with Segura, on the growth and influence of Latino voters 2008 – 2012 presidential elections.

In 2008, Barreto was a co-principal investigator (with Gary Segura) of the American National Election Study Latino oversample, which included the first ever-Spanish language translation of the ANES and the first ever oversample of Latino voters. In 2009, he was appointed to the ANES Board of Overseers.